That's a lot of social development! Nice. All that being the case I am somewhat surprised that you are still having problems with perceptions of scarcity.

I disagree that that's a fair characterization of me.

Then do not read it as one. I intended it to be approximately as applicable as the sister:

It's inevitable that I'll have to use advice that doesn't assume away the problem, for one thing.

Have you been approched by a venue supervisor because of a conversational goof with a stranger or new acquaintance?

Frequently. And I've been ostracized and kicked out of groups before as well. I considered those minor mistakes, and just moved on to the next venue. When this happened, of course it hurt. A lot. But I tried to be a good conversationalist, and gave it my best effort, and it didn't work out, so I learned what I could. People are weird sometimes.

I have had similar problems to yours (though, as I said, I don't know your exact situation), and I'm trying to tell you exactly what I have done and am doing to solve them. (It's worth noting that almost everyone has gone through the "huge failures" you're talking about; it's just that most people went through them as young children or teenagers, when they had an excuse for not knowing, and we just happened to learn slower.)

I'm asking that I can reasonably expect the failures not to cascade so that I can really go through a large enough number of interactions while actually learning.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Are you worried about building a negative reputation in your small town? Are you worried about being banned from every single location there? This sounds more like anxiety than a realistic concern (though as I said, I don't know your situation), and I suspect it's this very anxiety that's the problem.

Were the past situations where you've been kicked out of venues or whatever in a different town, or in your current small town? Did these mistakes follow you afterwards? I think Jim Random H.'s comment that small towns are toxic is accurate: they're not toxic for everyone, but for people with social difficulties, they can be horrible places because your mistakes follow you everywhere. Leave as soon as you can.

And a suggestion for you: if you want to drop out and save some face

I wouldn't do something like that. I'm trying to help, and I'm interested and curious in your situation. But I'm curious if on some level you actually want people here to give up and say "yes, you're beyond help, you're way worse than me."

Ouch.

With difficulties like that, you're probably not going to find any genuinely useful advice on the Internet. It might help if you got some extroverted person to coach you face-to-face. Have you tried that?

(FWIW, I overcame my problems on my own, but my problems were minor compared to yours. I had low-status behaviors that caused people to ignore me, but I could always parse the nonverbal context just fine.)

As you may have gathered from previous interactions with me and others here, I'm generally careful about my phrasing when I do give advice: I normally preface it with "Here is what I recommend" or the like. I wasn't giving you advice yet, but collecting information prior to giving advice.

I asked about Improv because it points out one specific thing I think you're doing wrong: you're often "blocking" as the improv jargon calls it. I would recommend you learn about (and practice) "yes and".

Your answer to my question is "blocking" in a synctactically typical manner: "yes to the second, but I lost brain cells going to the first meeting". "Yes, but" when what you're looking for in conversation is "yes, and". You're telling me in an oblique way ("lost brain cells") that Toastmasters wasn't a satisfactory experience for you, without giving me an opening for further conversation on that topic.

You could have phrased that in a thousand other ways more inviting of further conversation. Example: "Yes, I did try Toastmasters, and I was bored out of my mind; why did you ask, and what were you thinking I should have expected to get out of attending?"

I disagree with your assessment that "the problems is not being in groups per se". You've had many people here tell you that they find interacting with you often unpleasant, even though they are by no means "random people", they are from a social set that you have chosen and that by your own admission you want to get more closely involved with.

And to repeat something I've said previously: people discussing this topic with you here and now may not be very good advice-givers, but then you're not necessarily a very good advice-taker. Eye, mote, beam.

I've upvoted your response to the Go analogy because it's factually true. One thing you're overlooking, though, is that when a Go novice asks a Go master what they should learn about, it's a good idea to try very hard to extract something from the master's advice, no matter how bad the master seems to be at explaining. Otherwise you risk entering a common failure mode related to "blocking":

Master: you should study life and death. Student: no, my problem isn't life and death, I know about the two eyes thing, please teach me some killer openings. Master: at your level studying the opening is premature, learn how to stabilize your groups. Student: stop giving me advice I don't need, what's the best fuseki for black?

If you're fed up with one master, go seek another - rather than fruitlessly spend energy blocking the one. But if many masters are telling you the same thing, perhaps it's time to update.

Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?

I'm one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.

The primary social difficulties I used to have:

• Severe social anxiety (probably undiagnosed social phobia)
• Not knowing what to say and do in unscripted informal social situations
• Difficulty reading people and developing models of how they respond and feel (theory of mind?)

I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.

I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled "in software" to use Roko's analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social "muscles" I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).

As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.

Yet I've never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can't even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.

For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:

• I am very high in agreeableness and sensitivity
• I am non-confrontational, and have trouble expressing anger, aggression, or assertiveness (though I've improved on the last one)
• People seem to perceive me as non-threatening and trustworthy
• I was raised with a restrictive notion of manners

All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.

Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people's emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that's another discussion).

I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.

For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.

I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.

It's been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I'm starting to wonder if it's also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn't really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting "high status," being "the prize," and "not giving a crap." These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.

I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won't be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.

Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?

You don't need to control others to get what you want out of an interaction. In fact, letting go of control is a key step. It also paradoxically increases your influence (in non-toxic environments.) Reading Morendil's reply seven times is recommended. That was golden.

there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?

I do happen to meet that criteria, but there is more than one challenge that I (and most people to various degrees) had to overcome when starting conversations with random people, some of which required simple behavioral changes while some required fundamental changes in beliefs.

Is changing your beliefs a skill that you have developed? For example, did Juggler's influence change the way you think about social dynamics? Do you have the ability to actively question and update your model of yourself and your environment based on introspection and self awareness? I'm not making a snide insult here. Developing that skill is central to how I overcame those difficulties and, in various guises, what many social skills and personal development gurus will recommend. It does involve asking ourselves questions that we really don't want to hear.

Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?

No advice here, but I started thinking what the sort of advice you are looking for would look like, and whether much such advice even exists.

A different skill from social interactions, and probably a simpler one is playing Go. A notable thing about Go is that there isn't much instruction in the form of "if this happens, do that". That doesn't work, as there are too many possible game configurations, and whatever form a successful player's skill actually takes can't really be verbalized. Instead, people are just told to expect to lose a bunch of games at first, during which they are expected to build up the difficult to verbalize pattern matching abilities about what works and what doesn't in different situations. A bit like the advice to have a bunch of social interactions which you expect not to end very successfully.

Of course social interactions also have a much wider space of viable approaches than games of Go, so the analogy of needing to do things the hard way to build non-verbalizable pattern matching skills might not be that tight.

Reg Braithwaite has an article about the problems with a certain type of personality and trying to learn Go, when you just can't seem to go from declarative knowledge to procedural skill when picking up the game. Maybe it's relevant to learning social skills as well.

The "that you can't routinely leave" part seems more important than the "small town" part, to me - it's a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.

You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don't have RL opportunities to do so. It's not perfect - the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can't learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it's more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.